
One up the spout!
'Igniting a bullet's' what?
3D-printed weapons are back in the news, after a rifle billed as the first such device designed to be created on 3D printers was put through its paces with mixed results. Someone called “Matthew” who writes an instrument making journal and runs a YouTube Channel in which he shows off 3D-printed ukuleles yesterday added a video …
This post has been deleted by its author
No, that would be "Adam's a mistake". The particle "a" is required.
"Adam's mistake" is short for "The mistake of Adam." This is a possessive apostrophe.
"Adam's a mistake" is short for "Adam is a mistake." This is a contraction apostrophe.
"Igniting a bullet's not the hard part.." is a contraction. The 's is a contraction of "is".
"Igniting a bullet's charge", which is not in the article, would be a possessive apostrophe.
I'm assuming you're a non-native speaker?
With respect, you were taught by an eejit, then. The idea of a strict separation between the spoken and written versions of a language is not popular in English, where our writers have a long history of trying to capture the way people actually speak (Dickens, Puzo, O'Brian, Pratchett, Austen). We're not like the French, with their bloody past historic.
> Err .. so "Adam's mistake" actually mean that Adam is a mistake ..?
Did you RTFA?
"igniting a bullet's not the hard part" is a shortening of "igniting the bullet is not the hard part" (ignoring the obvious problem that igniting a bullet is actually an extremely difficult undertaking).
2 grammar nazi fails in one comments section!
Actually punctuation is not grammar.
Grammar is the set of structural rules that governs the composition of clauses, phrases and words in any given natural language.
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language (as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.)
So there.
No:
Punctuation marks indicate the structure and organization of written language (as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.)
Grammar is the set of structural rules that governs the composition of clauses, phrases and words in any given natural language.
Downvote that which you don't understand all you like: it doesn't make you right.
Igniting a bullet is impossible. Firing a round is possible but very dangerous no matter where you position yourself relative to the barrel.
Isn't getting a metal pipe from the hardware shop more effective than printing a plastics (and plastic) barrel?
Which is more dangerous a disintegrating plastics or metal barrel?
Two things are going on, thermal and physical shock. Both of which would be difficult to engineer with plastics.
Neither are particularly difficult to engineer with "modern" plastics. However engineering for such with the types of plastics that 3d printers use, now that's entirely different problem...
"Bang (or rather not bang?) goes my idea for knocking up replica Star Wars blasters."
You make the gun parts from aluminum and then print the rest.
So if you want, you could have someone buy a Ruger 10/22 receiver, after market barrel, and then print the rest using your 3D printer. (industrial model)
But still, it would even be cheaper to use another tech to create your skins and add ons...
The design of a 10/22 will not prevent you from modifying it in such a manner. The receiver design is such that all the firing components are inside the single part receiver assembly. The only parts below the receiver is the trigger assembly which you can modify if you want, but it shouldn't be necessary for what you are proposing.
As long as you don't modify the receiver you can do anything you want to a 10/22 safely. Make all the 'skins' you want out of anything you want. It will not affect the integrity of the firearm.
One can imagine, many years from now. The first explorers hit the surface of Mars and start to print out their habitats to stake shelter from the oncoming storm which would scour men, machine and materials which weren't safely under cover...
"Firearm detected. You cannot print out this model"
@NinjasFTW
That's the problem when you build the capability, courts are going to expect you to use it.
Re the thread more generally: Not for nothing but how do you even define a gun? It's just a tube, they gonna not print all tubes? The system obviously isn't AI so don't build something that implicitly looks like a gun. Software neutered successfully.
Wrote :- "A gun is made of lots of different pieces. Just print the pieces separately and you'll bypass any stupid restriction they might set"
That is what jumped out at me from TFA. How do they hope always to recognise gun parts? Or they will spread the net so wide that they will stop you making many common things, like any tube about 6" long and 1/4" bore, even if it is for an oil pump. A bit like you cannot type "Essex" on many forums.
@GitMeMyShootinIrons
As much as I support VHS I still feel Laserdisc is the better option.
Or heck, to avoid any safety concerns they should distribute small books in which you flip the pages really fast to get the image. Virus me with that I say..
But dont put anthrax between the pages, please!
What nonsense. How is 3D printer software supposed to figure the distinction between a thick tube used as some widget and a thick tube which is a gun barrel? It can't.
It is ridiculous for any 3D printer manufacturer to even make this claim. They've probably hacked in some dumb checksum test against existing 3D guns even though it would be trivial to subvert.
Tolerances for existing ammunition are tight enough that all the software would need to look for are holes of certain specified diameters. So, if the hole is .222 inches, suspect someone is making a .22LR barrel and yell at them?
I assume all existing printed guns are smoothbores, because there's no way in hell that 3d printed rifling would work. Which is also to say they'd be crappy pistols and even crappier rifles, even if they could get the bullet out the front without letting most of the gas out the sides.
..due to various flaws etc. this was after the '3D printed gun' uproar a few month ago The author seemed to overlook the fact that it was early days yet. Had he been at the Wright brothers inaugural flight, he would no doubt have concluded that powered flight was a fantasy, due to it being limited in range and only capable of carrying 2 people.
Yes, I do remember that article - and until today, he hasn't been proven wrong. I do believe we will see 3D-printed guns - but most likely they'll be 3D-printed parts connected to a standard metal plumbing pipe from your local hardware store.
I can envision some governments banning the sale of pipes of internal diameter suitable for holding a bullet without too much leakage.
I can also envision gun-printers producing plastic pipes of just the right external diameter to fit inside, and just the right internal for a bullet. Then the strong metal outside prevents explosion. That should work, so long as you don't fire too quickly and melt the plastic part of the barrel.
Problem with using a pipe from the hardware store is you need to then be able to rifle it for the gun to be able to fire anything worth shit. I imagine precision rifling on a printed barrel would be able to be achieved quite easily, not so easy on a standard metal pipe (though not exactly super hard either).
Wrote : "Problem with using a pipe ..is you need to then be able to rifle it for the gun to be able to fire anything worth shit."
No, you don't need rifling. Any gun will fire shit out the barrel, rifling or not. Without rifling however, the bullet will not stay aligned with the direction so will lose speed and accuracy more quickly. That will not matter at short range, as in a bank hold-up.
You are aware that smoothbore guns were used for centuries before rifling was invented (and some are still used)? That's why Trafalgar and Waterloo were fought at such close range.
The primary role of rifling is to provide a gas seal without the use of wadding. A nice side effect of rifling is that it allows you to control the inflight characteristics of the bullet. You are terriblely oversimplifying the reasons for the close ranges of traditional battles.
You can fire a shaped projectile up to 250 yards effectively using a smooth bore barrel and a round ball about 125 using black powder, much further using modern smokeless powders. The ridiculously huge size of old ammunition, the poor state of black powder, the use of wadding and the lack of knowledge and/or misunderstanding the relationships between the length of the barrel and its impacts on performance. Basically the barrels were too long and the rounds were too heavy for the low amount of pressure created by the black powder and the poor seal provided by wool or cotton wadding.
We manufactured 4,413 high precision rifle barrels for military and sport applications last year and we have done extensive testing and analysis of historic firearms as part of ongoing projects. People oversimplify firearms, but to make one accurate, safe and reliable is a serious engineering project. We also manufacture parts and test rigs for aerospace use. Engineering a quality firearm is more difficult than making parts for planes and satellites.
Wrote :- "The primary role of rifling is to provide a gas seal without the use of wadding. A nice side effect of rifling is that it allows you to control the inflight characteristics of the bullet."
Eh ?? Never heard that claim. Wadding was required in old smooth bores because of the poor fit of the ball in the barrel. Back in those days, someone needing an accurate shot, like for sniping, would go through his ammo the day before and select a few musket balls which happened to be a good fit. They might even file them to a better shape. Wadding would cease to be needed when ammo manufacturing improved (by which time rifles had replaced most smooth bore). The prime reason for rifling is in fact your "side effect" - to keep a longish thinnish cone-tipped bullet pointing forwards gyroscopically by spinning it. Compared with a spherical bullet, this had lower air resistance for its weight, and better target penetration.
Wrote :- "You are terriblely oversimplifying the reasons for the close ranges of traditional battles."
Yes, simplifying, but not "terribly". Another reason for close battles was the slowness of re-loading, so they fired a volley and then charged into hand-to-hand fighting rather than be caught by the enemy charging themselves while re-loading. And even the military long musket could not be relied on to hit an enemy at more than about 50 yards, even when perfectly aimed, not because it was not rifled but because of the poorly fitting ammo as mentioned.
But rifling FORCED the ammo makers to improve the fit - no point in rifle grooves if the bullet did not touch the sides. And once weapons were rifled, warfare took a quantum leap with the far greater ranges of both small arms and artillery.
The poor fit of the ball was why there was no gas seal. The wadding provided the seal between the barrel and the round. Primitive wadding did not work very well, hence part of the low velocities of old rounds. Accuracy is directly related to velocity so they weren't accurate either. Shotguns still use wadding for the same reasons (albeit plastic wadding in modern shells).
In a rifled barrel the pressure seal is maintained by the rifling cutting spiraled grooves into the bullet. A modern bullet is larger than the inside diameter of the lands in the rifling: If you try to push a bullet down a rifled barrel by hand you can't do it :) Rifling actually allows the bullet to be manufactured to looser tolerances because the 'fit' is actually cut into the bullet as it travels down the barrel.
Military and off the shelf sport ammunition have wide (comparatively speaking) variances in their diameter from round to round as they are cast then clad. When we manufacture our custom match barrels we bore & cut them specifically to the ammunition the client uses which is often either investment cast or individually machined. Ultimately this increases velocity (and accuracy) due to better sealing and consistency as the barrel wears in a reasonably predictable pattern as opposed to the random wearing experienced by using inconsistent off the shelf ammunition.
you might not need rifling, but you need a bore thats a tight fit for your bullet. steel pipes aren't much under 1/2" (0.500) down in the .22 range, you get copper tubing. even a weak .22 round down a copper tube would likely cause swelling or burst. remember, those smoothbore muskets were firing lead balls via black powder, way way less pressure and muzzle velocity than any modern round.
"standard plumbing pipes" wouldn't provide a tight fit, and any of nearly the right inside diameter would probably burst too. In any event, making a gun out of plumbing parts isn't hard (in fact it's done all the time by criminals and idiots). What's hard is making one that actually can hit something more than a foot away, and not do more damage to the person holding it than what tthe bullet hits.
Note the lanyard used in the video - it's going to be a long, long time before plastic 3d printed gun is safe enough to fire without hiding behind a barrier and using a string, which makes this whole thing a non-story - it's just another way to make a really bad zip gun.
"some countries have laws which ban gun ownership, developments such as this, and all the attempts which follow, are about to make those laws meaningless."
But those countries also tend to have laws about ammunition ownership, so even if 3D printers can overcome the problems of "how to make a plastic tube as strong as a machined steel barrel" you'd still have an unloaded gun.
Many engineering materials have properties imparted to them by the processes they are put through (work hardening, heat treatment, chemical dips etc.), these aren't just for cosmetics; creating a 3D shape is simple, but the physical properties of the material are also important.
There are some 3D printing techniques that may be suitable (e.g. direct metal laser sintering) but these are unlikely to be developed for home/office use, and the cost is likely to be similar to a set of dedicated machine tools for making firearms (price of an EOSINT 280 is over 400,000 pounds). Someone commented that 3D printers are at the stage of the Wright brothers first aircraft, I think they're a bit further along than that, but the aircraft analagy is a good one; the capability of aircraft has improved a lot since the Wright Flyer, but the price tag has also gone up a little too. Real 3D manufacturing isn't going to be developed for the home market, it's being developed for industrial scale processing, so the costs are unlikely to be attractive to back-street firearms dealers either.
And then you still can't buy ammunition.
You can get a gun in any country if you're willing to pay a lot and deal with criminals, but it's only serious criminals or serious nutters who will go down this route.
How are those laws going to be rendered meaningless? In any nation with strict gun controls there's always been the underground/criminal scene where you can purchase a gun quite easily. 3D printing one would fall under the same category as posession of an illegal firearm, with the resultant trouble with the local magistrates if you're caught.
Maybe the plods would add a charge of "malignant attempted suicide", since contemplating to actually use one of those things is suicidal and will recklessly endanger anybody happening to be near...
Seriously? You can't see how advances in this technology won't completely change the landscape of gun crime?
The idea that such gun designs will improve with effort and time couldn't possibly have any relevance, so you don't need to even consider that in your judgement of this subject?
The idea that being able to print a gun from easily disposed of materials (for say single use) wouldn't in anyway make it harder to prove any case that was actually deducted to have been committed by the accused in the dock, being yet another thought which isn't worthy of any of your time, because you know this fact won't affect gun crime in anyway?
When guns become printable atifacts that are easily completely disposable, by anyone at anytime, just by downloading the relevant plans (over a VPN of course), printed, assembled, used, melted down, then any laws surrounding preventing them being obtained become meaningless.
Oh and ammunition? Really? Cause like no one is going to work on designing a printable ammunition design, once printable gun design becomes better? Do you really think that?
Wrote :- "When guns become printable atifacts that are easily completely disposable, by anyone at anytime, .. then any laws surrounding preventing them being obtained become meaningless.
The laws are about owning guns, not obtaining them. No judge or plod is going to say "Oh, you made it not bought it, that's OK then".
I do not know if you live in the UK, but can assure you that here, the appearance of anyone with a gun (or what appears to be a gun) in public is treated as a top proirity alert by the police, who will drop everything else they are doing, and the person will quickly find themselves surrounded by a small army of cops, many of them with sniper rifles trained on them.
The fact that guns may be printed will not change that.
@ Nuke
How are they going to prove you owned/had possession of a gun which know one knows you made, no one saw you use, and which has now been melted down?
I do live in the UK, so I know you're talking rubbish. It only took the armed response unit 20 minutes to get to Lee Rigby as he was being hacked up on the street by at least one bloke who was holding a handgun...
That fact that guns remain illegal will become meaningless.
Nice try though.
Converting design files to the G Code language that the printer understands to print the object in slices, and since the software on the printer is pretty dumb and incapable of detecting what it is printing (it typically buffers only part of one layer at a time), all you'd need to do is slice the gun model in one of many open source packages (Slic3r being the most common) to bypass this limit completely. The claim is pretty useless and serves only to get press attention (oh look, it worked).
The sort of person who wants a 3D printer considers the engineering drawings, the model files for any printable parts, the wiring diagrams for the electronics, and the Source Code for the software to form part of the operating instructions. Any of those missing would be a dealbreaker.
"The sort of person who wants a 3D printer... Any of those missing would be a dealbreaker."
From this, we can draw 1 of 2 possible conclusions:
1. No 3D printers have ever been sold.
2. Your logic is wrong.
I'm going for.............................................1.
Therefore any 3D printers people claim to own are an illusion.
Q.E.D.
"A canned statement (PDF) saying that if users try to load a file for a 3D gun its “... smart software scans the model and tries to match its characteristics with the characteristics of a firearm. If certain features align, the software will not allow the user to view and print the model.”"
Phew, GW can breathe a sigh of relief. No one will be able to print their gun toting models any more. But what about the ones with the blow pipes?
Hence the gun-detection-technology.
Obvious marketing ploy that will not fool many i suspect.
Without an actual human judging whats printed, and remembering a list of previously printed parts, there is no way to make the software smart enough to keep it from printing anything that can be used as a gun.
The best they can come up with is a dumb checking algorithm like a blacklist of given file-names/CRC/Meta-data or other such simple checks.
It will keep illiterates from printing, but anyone who is really determined will find a way regardless.
It will evolve, but when the hype dies down, people will print off the reciever etc, and use a conventional steel barrel.
Owning a well equipped machine shop as a alternative hobby to technology, I could whip my own gun out in a few hours anyway, and it would be a lot better than any printed one.
To the commentator who says they think gov's will legislate against tube of certain diameters to stop this, firstly yes its possible they will do that, they are often clueless how things are done in the real world. However they would also have to legislate against drill's, boring bars, random pieces of metal that could be made into either a spade drill or a boring bar, etc etc. That genie is never going back in the bottle.
Disclaimer Ive never built my own gun. Although Ive knocked up some cracking alarm mines using blank shotgun cartridges. Make a great boom they do, scallies with filled pants at 20 paces... There's no functional difference between one loaded with shot and one blank firing apart from the desire not to be responsible for the death of someone innocent by accident who may have legitimate cause to trespass without prior permission (fire brigade, other emergency services etc).
Best post anon :D
Similar to the episode of Luther the other night, demonstrating that you can fire a bullet quite easily without a gun (bullet wedged in door, nail, #whack#) but that you really need a strong tight shaft (giggiddy) that will preferably put a spin on the resulting projectile by having a metal harder than the bullet to bite into it. Result in Luther? Mildly irritated bad guy who had effectively had a little chunk of metal thrown at him with a loud noise.
Note to all the people shouting "but it'll improve" and "just buy a metal tube". The "metal tube" (which will be unlikely to be printed in the near future) needs to be a very close (i.e. actually marginally smaller than the bullet) fit and of a material stronger than the bullet. Get one of those, and the "printed" part is irrelevant anyway.
|A canned statement (PDF) saying that if users try to load a file for a 3D gun its “... smart software scans the model and tries to match its characteristics with the characteristics of a firearm. If certain features align, the software will not allow the user to view and print the model.”|
Complete, Utter, Balderdash....
As people have earlier mentioned, all you have to do is split the print jobs up into individual components. Any software that then baulks at a part is obviously completely untrustworthy and could baulk at any tubular shape that you really require printing.
And another parallel with the porn-search-filtering nonsense: even if we accept that one shouldn't view porn or make functioning firearms, there are valid reasons to search on "dodgy" terms, and valid reasons to print something that looks a bit like a gun. Novelty cigarette lighters, umbrella handles, water pistols...
ISTM that any benefit is outweighed by the inconvenience of false positives.
I'm in the USA but I really don't see the big deal about this - given a modest amount of money you can build a gun from raw stock - OK, so it will not be a very good gun but it will be a gun. What these folks are doing is not "building a gun" - what they are doing is simply meeting a challenge.
Sure, the first few will blow up but once they figure out that they need a different barrel and receiver structure if you are working in plastic rather than metal, I would expect to see these become ubiquitous.
When the authorities tell any young person that "IT'S NOT POSSIBLE" then the first thing you want to do is have a go at it - this urge is as old as the hills. Seriously, if all they wanted to do was make a gun then just buy the parts and assemble it, I'd bet that even in the UK it's quite feasible to order the various components via POTS or the Internet and have them delivered over a few months ... here in the USA you don't even have to go through that pretense. It's not an ideal situation certainly but we live with it and it's not going to charge any time soon - so there's no point in playing King Canute - that really would be stupid.
Wrote :- "I'd bet that even in the UK it's quite feasible to order the various components via POTS or the Internet and have them delivered over a few months"
Order components ?! I made a gun at about the age of 13 from Meccano and stuff I found in the shed. It was actually like a model anti-aircraft gun with a shielded mount and worm-gear drives for elevation and traverse. It fired 1/4" ball bearings from a brass tube barrel like a simple cannon. For powder I dismantled fireworks, and for priming I used something called "Jetex fuse".
In the alley behind our house there was an old steel dustbin and I found that shots would go through one side and out of the other. For me it was merely an excercise in model engineering and I never did anything "bad" with it. I still have that brass tube somewhere.
I mean seriously, in many countries, particularly the US, you can buy gun parts, or you can make guns from easily available parts. As the article mentions the main problem is surviving the gas pressures. Guess what, there's probably plenty of metal pipes in any hardware store which probably can just do that. Add something to ignite the bullet and you have a gun.
Trying to add some sort of "DRM" by trying to detect guns certainly does not solve the problem. You can just patch out the check and people will probably do that because of false positive.
We won't allow HP to tell us what we can print on their model of printer, and we won't allow Dell or Intel to tell us what we can create on their model of computer, so we sure as hell won't allow some 3d printer company tell us what we can or can't create, based on their own idealogy.
If we can't print them, we will build our own 3d printer and software. it's a great time to do exaclty that, and lots of potential business for those that are in the business of selling such a product.
Let those who try to stand in the way of progress, get passed by.
Already done.
Google "RepRap" and drool. A completely open-source, patent-free, self-replicating 3D printer (all you need to get hold of elsewhere are the electronics) which is proving to be extremely popular and has become the default standard for 3D printing.
Once you have one, it's trivial to use it to make more for all your friends. It's a self-replicating replicator (or the first step towards one anyway!)
A couple things to note:
1. The cartridge used was a .22LR, which is a very low powered cartridge. It still split the barrel and receiver, which makes perfect sense. Even that small a cartridge generates a pretty decent about of pressure (24,000 PSI per SAAMI specs) when it's fired. The receiver, chamber, and barrel must contain that for safety's sake. By way of comparison, the 9x19 spec is 35,000 psi, and the 7.62x39 that the AK47 uses is a whopping 45,000 PSI. The fact that the barrel and receiver failed on the first shot does not surprise me at all.
Indeed!
For the proposes of a DIY firearm you are better off using something like a .45ACP or .45 +P round as they have much lower, and safer, case pressure and more stopping power due to the mass of the bullet. A corollary example is how the super skinny tires of a road bicycle are inflated to 90 PSI and on a mountain bike the tires might be 18-20 PSI.
Case pressure is a result of the case volume, powder and primer selection and is not indicative of the total energy transferred by the bullet. Case pressure does affect acceleration and trajectory curve, but less or more pressure, by itself, does not translate to a less or more 'powerful' cartridge.
Seems people don't think very far past the printed part. Your brain is the most dangerous weapon you can bring to bear...
If you consider that you can take these 3D printed parts, coat them in mold release, dip them in plaster and make a mold, then bake the polyethylene out of the mold, it is a simple matter to make a durable metal part from the resulting cavity. Bronze would be simple, steel or iron would be a little more difficult but not impossible. All would be quite strong enough depending on thickness. The barrel would need to be pipe or mechanical tubing and can be easily machined to fit whatever ammo you can find.
However, as a teenager I made zip guns from a block of wood, a spring, nail, a .22 bullet or shotgun shell and suitable piece of tubing. No rifling was needed and they worked multiple times.
More importantly, we did not even have computers then let alone 3D printers.
Looks like they will have to ban the use of fingers and brains then just to be sure....